Poland Tries to Save Its Last Manors of Nobility

Poland’s noble families, dispersed around the world or reduced to cramped walk-ups in their native land, have little but memories of their once elegant estates.

Most of the landed gentry’s homes have been destroyed since the communists nationalized their property in the late 1940s.

Now, with the communist regime gone, a last-chance effort is afoot to preserve the remaining historic manors, either by returning them to their former owners or finding new ones.

Ludwika Sobanska-Tyszkiewiczowa, born to one of Poland’s noblest families and married to another, remembers the vast estate of her birth in the Ukraine. At age 2, she played with nuts on the floor as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 raged outside the sandbagged windows.

As a newlywed on the eve of World War II, she moved to her husband’s manor in eastern Poland. Within a year, she was swimming the river outside with her baby strapped to her back and the Red Army in pursuit.

Equally vivid are recollections of the carefree opulence of those years between the wars, when the lawns and ballroom of the family palace at Guzow, outside Warsaw, were filled with Poland’s dignitaries.

With a wistfulness echoed even by Poles of common birth, Sobanska lingers on the memory of her family’s dwory , manor houses of the self-sufficient estates on which rural Poland’s social and economic system was based for four centuries.

Dwory were administrative centers for the surrounding farmland, warehouses and mills. Some were palaces, others large farmhouses. They were built in tune with the vacillating fortunes of Poland’s passionately nationalist, clannish and independent nobility, which was 10% of the population in the 16th Century and among Europe’s largest through the 18th Century.

Of Sobanska’s properties in Poland, the one at Guzow and a Warsaw mansion still stand, but they no longer belong to her. What did not succumb to war or shifting borders was taken by the new Communist state.

Stately homes of Poland’s much-romanticized gentry became the orphanages and factory headquarters of People’s Poland. Farmland was divided among the peasants.

Without money for proper upkeep, dwory fell to ruin and were abandoned, with tragic consequences to the nation’s cultural heritage.

Forty-five years later, little remains. Of the estimated 20,000 historic homes that survived World War II, only about 2,000 are salvageable.

Nostalgia, the desire to right wrongs and capitalist zeal for a good bargain propel the preservation effort.

Former owners may apply to reclaim their properties. The Culture Ministry and the post-communist era’s first private real estate companies also are hunting new buyers.

“What is happening in Poland now offers great hope for monuments,” said Tadeusz Zielinewicz, the ministry’s chief building conservator. “We conservators have always been saying the best way of protecting a monument is a good use, a good owner. The state was not such a good owner.”

In many ways, it is painful work.

“It has all turned into ruin,” Sobanska said after a recent tour of the palace at Guzow, 25 miles east of Warsaw, now headquarters for an adjacent sugar beet factory. “It will be too late for me, but maybe someone from my family can invest.”

Pravin Shah, a jeans merchant from Wales, stood somberly before the decaying facade and boarded-up windows of a manor in Zdunowo.

“It makes me sad to see something so beautiful standing there, waiting,” said Shah, who is looking over Polish manors in search of an investment.

Grass covered the sweeping drive and sewage choked the ornamental ponds. Sunlight filtering through a hole in the roof touched the few bits of ornamental plaster still in place.

The manor was used as an agricultural school, then abandoned for a decade, and a young Polish architect bought it for a song two years ago.

He wants to make it into a 55-room hotel and restaurant just 45 minutes north of the capital, but needs $2.5 million. Janusz Lipinski, co-founder of Poland’s first real estate agency, Korona, is looking for a Western investor who sees the potential in a country so short of tourist accommodations.

Lipinski has 100 or more applications from families seeking to buy back homes that were nationalized after the war. Parliament is working out favorable terms, but most families don’t have enough money.

This “re-privatization” of homes, as opposed to farmland, is encouraged by many people who harbor a deep respect for the stratified society of Poland’s past glory. Despite four decades of communism, the names of aristocratic Polish families are easily recalled.

In July, when Princess Klaudia Sanguszko visited the family estate near Tarnow in southeastern Poland, former servants lined up to meet her and the town council made her son, called “the young prince” by newspapers, an honorary citizen.

Purchases by foreigners are more controversial and few have come to fruition. Members of Parliament, nervous about Poland’s being “bought out,” especially by a united Germany next door, voted in July to prohibit sales of state-owned property to foreigners.

Long-term leases are allowed, and privately owned tracts of land can be sold with Interior Ministry permission. Joint-venture companies also can buy.

Joanna Onyskiewicz, Lipinski’s partner in the Korona agency, is adamant about bringing commercial viability to Poland’s historic properties.

“We have no other chance, in a country where the kitty is empty, to save our heritage ourselves,” she said.

Low prices are a large part of the lure. A manor in run-down condition can sell for as little as $1,000.

Korona offers a 10-room country house with surrounding gardens that could be remodeled as a small hotel, for a modest total investment of $250,000.

There is the stuff of dreams: a gutted, 36-bedroom palace from the early 18th Century on 30 acres of parks that once were landscaped. The Rubber Industry Institute will sell it for $200,000.

Falling in love with a Polish dwory is just the beginning.

“Buyers face a fantastic amount of red tape,” Lipinski said. “You have to be patient in Poland.”

Both initial questions--Who is the owner and how much does it cost?--require detective work in the infamous bureaucratic maze.

Some properties are government-owned with a state industry as a long-term tenant.

Buyers also face the daunting task of a complete renovation, from water pipes to roof, in a nation short of building materials. Strict rules for historical restoration must be followed.